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The world celebrates Labor Day as International Workers Day on May 1. The United States is an outlier, even though the May 1 solidarity day began in Chicago in 1886 as a result of police violence against people demonstrating for an eight-hour workday.
President Grover Cleveland opposed the United States celebrating International Workers Day, but signed legislation in 1894 designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day. Cleveland did not want the U.S. union movement associated with a day he considered “socialist-inspired.”
The purpose of Labor Day or International Workers Day is to honor workers and recognize their tireless efforts worldwide, regardless of profession or social class. It celebrates workers’ vital role in building and maintaining economies and communities, the fabric of society.
Labor Day should be a platform to raise awareness about workers’ rights, including fair wages, safe working conditions, protection from exploitation and the need for continuous improvement in labor standards and regulations. It underscores social justice and equitable opportunities for workers, eliminating discrimination and creating a fair labor environment.
The U.S. capitalist system has adeptly eliminated Labor Day commemorations of American workers and diminished their visibility as a workforce. Labor Day has been reduced to an end-of-summer holiday. Few Americans, I wager, have a clue about the origins of the day, let alone its original purpose of lifting up workers.
Texas politicians bend over backward to oppress workers. The legislature, at Gov. Greg Abbott’s bidding, took away the legal ability of cities to require water and rest breaks for workers. Imagine construction workers under the hot Texas summer sun being told by their employer, “Sorry, no water or rest break for you.”
Wage theft is endemic. Even though I retired from the Texas Civil Rights Project eight years ago, I am still handling wage theft cases because people can’t find attorneys or government entities to help them. That occurs frequently with people building and readying the fancy apartment and office complexes all around us. The company gives the money to a “middleman,” who the company claims is an “independent contractor.” It is a subterfuge: Pay the contractor who in turn does not pay the workers and keeps the money. Nobody believes this happens by chance. The workers most exploited by wage theft are immigrants.
The current discussion about not taxing tips for service and restaurant workers underscores another point. The minimum wage law should not have an exception that depends on the random benevolence of customers possibly giving tips so that workers might make the minimum wage, as low and pathetic as it is. Nor is there any guarantee all the workers share the tipping, not just the recipient. We accept and don’t challenge this incongruity and injustice.
Most Texans enjoy the benefits of the labor movement: five-day work weeks, overtime pay, medical benefits, paid vacation and retirement. But we don’t “see” the other workers, those who don’t have these benefits, yet upon whom society depends to do the labor no one else will do and at wages no one else would accept.
This denigrates the unseen workers in our community, and it’s a lack of solidarity with those who do the dirty work and build the economic foundation of our society. And on Labor Day, of course, all kinds of people will be working in low-paying jobs so the rest of us can celebrate the long weekend, providing services, recreation, food (thanks to farm workers), and so on.
Workers’ rights are based on their inherent dignity. Workers are not a means of production like raw materials and capital. They are entitled to work in good conditions that offer fair pay. We need to “see” them and stand up for them.
This Labor Day is a good time to start doing better at “seeing” the workers around us and raising our voices loudly against injustice. And keep politicians from further exploiting workers in our name.
James C. Harrington is the retired founder of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
